Why Have Sedition Cases Been Filed Because Two UP Women Eloped Together?

When you read headlines that a missing person has been recovered, you automatically assume that they were lost, couldn’t find their way back, and needed to be found. That is profoundly not the case here.

Two lesbian women from Sikka village in Uttar Pradesh aged 19 and 20, both named Pinki, were, according to Gaysi, arrested on May 3rd after they eloped with each other. The case is both weird and worrying.

The worrying: After the women told their families that they wanted to be with each other, and both families were against the idea, one of the women was forced by her family to get engaged to a man. It was also the women’s families who went to the police with the case when the women decided to elope. News reports say that the women were recovered from Ghaziabad, where they had been (peacefully) living as a couple. I’m not sure why they were labelled missing in the first place, since they were two adults living their lives as they pleased, and didn’t owe their clearly abusive families anything. They told the police they loved each other, and had plans to get married. The police have now sent both the women to be medically examined, which sounds both completely unnecessary and terribly traumatic.

The weird: Gaysireports that the two families have filed sedition cases against each other. That would have honestly shocked me a lot more about three years ago, but ever since 2014, the word sedition has been lobbed about so meaninglessly in just so many patently non-seditious situations that it’s become a word that clearly has no meaning any more.